Manufacturers must provide information about their products to resellers, consumers, and others. Resellers need product information to select, promote and support the products they distribute. Consumers need information about available products to make informed buying choices. Advertisers, product analysts, manufacturer's representatives, shippers, and others also need information about the goods with which they deal.
Under current practices, product information typically originates with manufacturers and is primarily distributed in conventional print media advertising and product packaging. This information is often incomplete, difficult to update, and available only to a limited distribution. While the advent of the World Wide Web has permitted manufacturers to make detailed, up-to-date product information available via the Internet, the information describing a specific product is often difficult to locate, particularly when the URL (uniform resource locator) of the manufacturer's website is not known.
It is a general object of the present invention to transfer a request for information specified by an identifier, such as a product code, to a preferred source of that information, such as an Internet information resource devoted to the product specified by the product code which is created and maintained by the product's manufacturer.
The preferred embodiment of the present invention employs an Internet resource, called a "product code translator," for storing cross-references between universal product codes identifying specific products and Internet addresses specifying the locations at which information about these products may be obtained. The cross-references specify the universal product codes assigned to the participating manufacturers, such as the U.P.C. and EAN codes widely used in retail stores for barcode scanning at checkout counters, and the Internet addresses where information can be obtained about the products designated by those codes.
In a principle aspect, the present invention takes the form of methods and apparatus for delivering information about products and manufacturers via the Internet using all or part of the universal product codes which designate these products and manufacturers as Internet access keys. The product information is stored in Internet servers, preferably in XML format, by the manufacturers who both produce the products and control the content of the stored product information.
Internet shoppers and others who desire product information fetch web pages via the Internet from on-line merchants and other sources. These web pages may contain one or more links to product information, and each such link contains a reference which designates a particular product by its corresponding universal product code. When the web browser operated by the shopper activates such a link, a request message containing at least a portion of the universal product code is sent via the Internet to a cross-referencing database, preferably maintained by the Internet Domain Name Service, which returns the Internet address of the particular manufacturer's server which then makes the desired product information available.
The present invention may be used to particular advantage to provide product information to web customers who visit web sites operated on behalf of retail stores which use universal product codes both for bar code checkout and to identify specific products in a computerized inventory control system. The retailer's inventory control systems need not store detailed product information since, by means of the invention, the universal product codes of items being offered for sale can be used to access product information directly from the manufacturer's servers.
In one embodiment of the invention, the cross-referencing function may be performed by a server which receives a hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) request message containing a universal product code, performs a lookup operation using a stored database of cross-references, and returns an HTTP response message which includes a location header field containing a destination URL specifying said particular Internet address. The requesting web browser then automatically redirects the request message to the destination URL.
The company code portion only of the universal product code may be stored in the cross-referencing database to refer a product information inquiry to the server operated by the manufacturer, with the remainder of the product code being sent to the manufacturer's server to identify the particular product. This reduces the size of the cross-referencing database, and further simplifies the process of registering manufacturers and maintaining the database.
When the cross-referencing server takes the form of an independently operated server, the standard Light-weight Directory Access Protocol can be employed to advantage to provide cross-references between all or part of each universal product code and the Internet address where information about that product may be obtained. Access to product information can be even more simplified and expedited by using the existing Internet Domain Name service to perform cross-referencing, a capability which can be added to the existing Internet infrastructure by simply reserving a preassigned name space for product code to address conversion.
By storing product information expressed in eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and by using stylesheet information provided by the web site which is incorporating product information into their web presentations, the data supplied by the manufacturer can be rendered using font sizes, typefaces, background colors and formatting selected by the web page producer. Other characteristics of XML, including the ability to encourage or enforce conformity with content and formatting standards through the use of Document Type Definitions (DTD's)and the Resource Definition Framework (RDF) and Syntax Specification, facilitate the integration of data from retailers and other web page producers with the product information provided by manufacturers.
When the manufacturers of some products identified on web pages have not made product descriptions available, it is desirable to suppress the creation of visible link anchors which encourage users to attempt to activate links which will not work as intended. Such link suppression can be accomplished by determining the status of each desired link before the web page containing the product list is displayed. "Image-cued links" perform this function by employing, as link anchors, visible web page components such as image files which are retrieved via the cross-referencing server at the time the web page is displayed.
These and other objects, features and advantages of the present invention will be made more apparent through a consideration of the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment of the invention. In the course of this description, frequent reference will be made to the attached drawings.